THE BIG NOW.

by Stanley

We are told it is best to live in the now. But seldom are we so gripped by the moment as when the earthquake first struck, seized by the immediate violence, the house brutally shaking as though by some ferocious predator. In this moment you are totally in the present, awestruck by the experience. There is nothing else. Overwhelmed by the BIG NOW .

What you perhaps don’t realise is that all the BIG NOWS you’ve ever had collapse on you at that moment. All at once. All those ‘nows’ fused into one overwhelming experience, merged into the same spasm of fear. They are all same, felt as an overpowering NOW – all experienced instantly.

When there is a great calamity you tend to experience all your overwhelmings at once. They all collapse on you at the same time. Trouble is you can’t get past the conviction that it’s all about the very latest now. In one overpowering moment there is no space between these incidents on the time-track. Time conflates. It is totally THIS experience that is scaring me, it’s this bloody earthquake that is happening NOW that’s frightening. And surely it is – but it also wakes up all the times in your life when there were emergencies and impacts that were life threatnening.

Even after the earthquake it’s particularly hard to see past it. Why do bad moments conflate like this? Why do they condense into one single experience, the last ‘now’? Why does the time-track collapse into one single terrifying moment? The whole mechanism suddenly dawned on me when I saw someone’s reaction to the quake, (and since I have seen many similar). An overwhelming panic reaction seems to be followed by a need to be hugged and held like a child, with the haunting fear of being alone. For days they can be in this childlike state with the persistent feelings of fear and aloneness – the slightest after-tremor triggering the same intense moment of panic. Focusing carefully on this reveals that these feelings are exactly the same as in certain incidents experienced earlier in life, particularly in childhood. A focusing session on the instant of the quake opens up and differentiates all these sequences stretching back in a lifetime and dissipates the continuing restimulation. I have found there is a special way to do this kind of focusing session.

Bad impacts conflate because they all have one thing in common: you are overwhelmed by the now; and this is the reason why each, as it happens, is the only one. Each one is NOW. This last one isn’t a different experience: emotionally it’s the same, the same experience of being overwhelmed and rendered powerless. I cannot emphasis enough that these moments of extreme emergency in one’s life are not differentiated – the impact is felt as THE SAME. This is not to devaluate the awfulness of the earthquake and the devastation it has caused for many, it is merely to look into the psychological effects.

Believe me, there have been times before when you were afraid you were going to die, most likely as a child. As a child, with all the promise of life, you were in fact very close to the death. Before you were conceived you were nothing; now suddenly launched into a foreign space where the air hurts and the light blinds. Frightened and powerless – desperate for the right kind of care. With so fragile a grip on life, it doesn’t take much to scare you to death; and the imprint of such moments become prototypes of all the terrifying fears down the line, right up to the present, whether it’s a car accident, fear in a bumpy aircraft ride, a divorce – or, an earthquake.